TRANSNATIONAL RESISTANCE IN THE ALPS-ADRIATIC … · a tessere un’organizzazione segreta di...

ACTA HISTRIAE • 20 • 2012 • 4

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received: 2011-06-07 UDK 94:323.26(436.5+497.4)"1939/1945"original scientific article

TRANSNATIONAL RESISTANCE IN THE ALPS-ADRIATIC-AREA IN 1939/40.

ON SUBVERSIVE BORDER-CROSSERS, HISTORICAL INTERPRETATIONS, AND NATIONAL POLITICS OF THE PAST1

Peter PIRKERUniversity of Vienna, Department of Government,Lorenz-Bayer-Platz 17/13, 1170 Vienna, Austria

e-mail: [email protected]

ABSTRACTIn 1939, agents of the D Section of British Secret Service MI6 started to build a secret

sabotage and intelligence organization in Yugoslavia directed against Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The article identifies various actors of the network who developed cross-border links into Italy as well as into former Austria. The focus lies on two types of activist: German intellectuals in Yugoslavia and actors from the Slovene- and German- speaking mixed populations in the borderland of former Austria, Slovenia and Italy. In contesting older national historical interpretations, the set up is characterized as a trans-national subversive network aiming at the transfer of spirit, knowledge and techniques of Anti-German resistance. Furthermore, the article analyses the proceedings of a German trial in 1941 which reconstructed the network as a communist endeavour lead by British Jews. The article concludes by investigating how the executions of members of the sabo-tage organisation had been dealt with in Austria after 1945.

Key words: MI6, SOE, TIGR, German exile, Austria, Carinthian Slovenes, resistance, pre-war Yugoslavia, politics of the past

RESISTENZA TRANSNAZIONALE NELL’AREA DELL’ALPE-ADRIA NEL 1939/40. ATTIVISTI TRANSFRONTALIERI SOVVERSIVI, INTERPRETAZIONI

STORICHE, POLITICHE E NAZIONALI DEL PASSATO

SINTESINel 1939, gli agenti della sezione D dei Servizi segreti britannici MI6 cominciarono

a tessere un’organizzazione segreta di sabotaggio e intelligence in Jugoslavia, diretta contro la Germania nazista e l’Italia fascista. Il presente contributo individua i diversi protagonisti della rete, che stabilì collegamenti transfrontalieri con l’Italia e l’ex-Aus-tria, e si incentra su due tipi di attivisti: gli intellettuali tedeschi in Jugoslavia e gli attori

1 This article is based on the author’s research within the context of the project "The Austrian Section of SOE. Policy, Personnel, Missions, Memory" at the Department of Government at the University of Vienna (supervisor: Ao.Univ.-Prof. Dr. Walter Manoschek). Research was funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). All quotations from German and Austrian sources were translated into English by the author.

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appartenenti alla popolazione mista di slovenofoni e germanofoni nelle terre di confine dell-ex Austria, Slovenia e Italia. Impugnando le vecchie interpretazioni storiche nazi-onali, vi si espone la struttura dell’organizzazione quale rete sovversiva transnazionale che mirava a trasmettere lo spirito, il sapere e le tecniche della resistenza antitedesca. Inoltre, il contributo analizza gli atti di un processo tedesco del 1941 che presentò e ricostruì la rete come un tentativo comunista guidato dagli ebrei britannici. Il contributo si conclude con un’indagine su come l’Austria abbia affrontato il tema dei membri giusti-ziati dell’organizzazione di sabotaggio dopo il 1945.

Parole chiave: MI6, SOE, TIGR, esilio tedesco, Austria, sloveni della Carinzia, resist-enza, Jugoslavia prebellica, politiche del passato

INTRODUCTION

In late 1941, an official at the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Of-fice) noted that, compared to the 'Altreich' [...] Ostmark was significantly more important in terms of sabotage policing, as foreign intelligence services and local resistance groups had already understood the need to build sabotage organizations that sprang into action once the war began, particularly after the start of military operations in the East".2 Apart from the Czech section of the underground Communist Party of Austria, which perpe-trated 47 arson and bomb attacks around Vienna after the war began (Neugebauer, 2008, 84) and a "train sabotage organization in Carinthia and Styria" that had been exposed in the fall of 1941, the analysis – particularly the reference to "foreign intelligence services" – referred to a cross-border sabotage organization active between summer 1939 and sum-mer 1940 in Yugoslavia, Italy and the territory formerly known as Austria ("Ostmark"). The latter of these organizations is the subject of this article. Before expounding on this further, it is necessary to take a brief look at the geopolitical background: The initial phase of British subversive warfare against Germany from Yugoslavia lasted from the summer of 1939 (the start of the war) to the summer of 1940. It occurred against the background of an indirectly led struggle between Great Britain and the Axis powers, the focus of which centered on drawing Yugoslavia into the respective system of alliances or at least prevent-ing it from being taken into the opposing camp (Pirjevec, 2010, 34; Vodušek Starič, 2005, 33; Pirker, 2010, 115).

Great Britain was in a difficult position from the start: As opposed to Germany and Italy, Great Britain had only had a very weak economic and political presence in Yugosla-via in 1939 (Barker, 1976, 28; Knoll, 1986, 9; Suppan, 1996, 297). With the annexation of Austria into the German Reich, German intelligence services – many of them headed by Austrians (the Germans regarded Austrians as "experts" on the Balkans) – moved directly

2 DÖW, a. u. 1444, Geheime Staatspolizei, Tätigkeit der Kommunisten in Deutschland und in den von Deutschland besetzten Gebieten nach Beginn des Krieges mit der Sowjetunion, [1941].

Peter PIRKER: TRANSNATIONAL RESISTANCE IN THE ALPS-ADRIATIC-AREA IN 1939/40 ..., 765–788


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to the Yugoslavian border. Shortly thereafter, the British Secret Intelligence Service’s (SIS – MI6) D Section, which was formed in April 1938 for the purpose of subversive-militant suppression of Nazi Germany, initiated its assault on German ascendancy. For this mission, D Section agents sought alliances with anti-fascist and anti-German forces on a local level in various European countries, including exiles from those where the Nazis had already seized power.

In adopting recent theoretical discussions (Calvin, 2005, 423; Patel, 2008, 69), I char-acterize these networks as "transnational" in three respects. First, the connections crossed national borders and linked anti-fascists from diverse national communities. In many cases, subversive, transborder connections were established by activists with life experi-ences that allowed them to operate in different national contexts and transfer knowledge and techniques for sabotage and subversion. Second, with a view on the institutional structure, it can be stated that a wide range of different affiliations or institutional loyalties were connected: state-driven secret services, non-state cultural associations with links to underground political groups, intellectuals and journalists, political activists in exile, refugees and Wehrmacht deserters, and individuals who simply supported efforts out of friendship or kinship. Third, for most of the activists, a nation state remained their central frame of reference and pole of loyalty.

The D Section was also active in other European countries, but nowhere as inten-sively as in Yugoslavia. In a situation of overwhelming German domination across the continent, the D Section made a conscious effort to spread the spirit of resistance and to show that Germany was vulnerable. The British agents’ interventions ranged from systematic defamation of pro-German and German businessmen and politicians to anti-German propaganda, all the way to sabotage and politically subversive actions such as organizing anti-German demonstrations or supplying TIGR, the liberal-national Slove-nian underground organization, with explosives, weapons, and money (Barker, 1976, 30). The only sabotage methods considered taboo included poisoning the water supply, spreading bacteria, and similar acts of biological warfare directed against human beings, though instigating the importation of foot-and-mouth disease and potato plague seemed as self-evidently to be a part of the D Section’s activities as the attacks on transportation lines, power plants, and production centers.3 For the D Section, Yugoslavia also became important as an experimental field for testing various methods of subversive and irregular warfare in which the previous secret services had no experience, and to prove the effec-tiveness and suitability of these means in foreign affairs.4 The involvement of government officials was crucial to the relatively intense subversive struggle against Germany in Yu-goslavia. Unlike the situation in other neutral countries such as Switzerland or Sweden, in 1939/40 D Section agents and their local and exiled allies in Yugoslavia could count on the partial support and backing from the state apparatus, particularly that of the Ministry of the Interior and the UJKA, the Yugoslav counterintelligence (Bajc, 2002, 370; Biber, 2000, 233).5

3 TNA-HS 7/4, History 3A, D Section, Slovene Organization; cf. Onslow, 2005.4 TNA-HS 7/3, D Section, Balkans, Early History to September 1940.5 Police in Sweden and Switzerland cracked down on every attempt to sabotage German property. In Swe-


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I will not be entering a more detailed analysis of the D Section’s Balkan division and its "Slovene organization" here, nor will I be reconstructing events as they appear in D Section sources. These (and the TIGR) have already been addressed in a number of pub-lications (e.g. cf. Pirker, 2010; Ferenc, 1977; Wohinz, Pirjevec, 1998, 58; Bajc, 2002).6 Instead, I would like to provide a brief overview before directing attention to two protago-nists of German origin who have received little consideration in previous research, but whose activities highlight the transnational character of this organization pitted against Germany’s policy of expansion. Furthermore, I will attempt – on the basis of German court records and a RSHA study – to give an assessment of those individuals, who coop-erated in the "Ostmark" with Slovenian activists from the Slovenian Littoral (Primorska). In doing so I problematize the assessments given in the historiography to date, by which activists in the "Ostmark" were classifiable as TIGR or could be considered representative of early Slovenian resistance in Carinthia. Both of the groups mentioned here are, in my opinion, examples of exceptions for the 1939–1941 time period – for both the German-speaking exile as a whole and for Nazi opponents within the German Reich –, and cannot be understood without the background of British organization and instigation. There are, however, also individuals within the second group that do not fit the profile of militant resistance fighters, but who were nonetheless mercilessly persecuted by Nazi authorities. The decisive factor in the persecution of these individuals had less to do with verifiable, concrete activity than with the Nazi regime’s particular aim to relentlessly pursue any kind of resistance or noncompliance on the "home front", even in the heyday of blitzkrieg. This becomes especially clear in an analysis of the Reich’s wartime judicial proceedings from July 1941 in Klagenfurt. It should also enable some comparative observations on the special military tribunal held on December 1941 in Trieste against the Slovenian anti-fascists, which was also related to the transnational sabotage organization’s exposure. In the last section, I will address the way in which the murdered resistance fighters of the sabotage organization were dealt with in Austria after 1945.

THE TRANSNATIONAL SABOTAGE ORGANIZATION IN 1939/40 AND ITS DIS-COVERY

In early June 1940, the RSHA in Berlin quickly formed a special commission to inves-tigate sabotage in the "Ostmark" and in Yugoslavia.7 Within a few weeks, there had been four explosives attacks on a war-critical railway line between the Silesian coalfields and Italy (Southern Railway), three near the Styrian town of Judenburg and the other close to Tarvisio. Prior investigations revealed that, like those that had already been used for

den, for example, German maritime trade unionist Hermann Knüfken was arrested in November 1939 for working with the D Section on the sabotage of German ore transports. Knüfken sat in Swedish prisons until 1944 (Nelles, 2001, 320; Knüfken, 2008).

6 One key D Section document has already been published in part in: Pirjevec, 2000. For a literary approach see: Pahor, 2009.

7 PA-AA, a. u. R 100734, RSHA IV A 2, Vol. 3362/40g tied to IV A 2a – Vol. 722/40 gRs., Sabotage und Terrororganisation in der Ostmark, Berlin, 28. 12. 1940.



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anti-German sabotage in Norway, the detonator caps had been manufactured in England. The Reichsbahn had already been forced to put more and more freight trains coming out of Yugoslavia out of commission due to broken axle bearings. Numerous reports from SD and Gestapo informants in Graz and Klagenfurt, as well as German agents in Yugoslavia, had come to form a picture that the public mood in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia – particu-larly in Slovenia – revealed an increasingly open anti-German sentiment.

In addition to this, there had also been a pile of reports concerning arson attacks on German warehouses, acts of sabotage to factories that produced for Germany and on transport routes essential for supplying the German armaments industry with raw mate-rials.8 A summary report dated late February 1940 from the Foreign Affairs Department of the Security Service (SD) states: "Since the annexation of Austria to the Reich […] we have observed lively activity from the English [intelligence] in Yugoslavia, especially in Slovenia and Croatia. […] In making use of all anti-German circles, the English intel-ligence agency has found an excellent means for facilitating its work in Yugoslavia. It avails itself of the numerous Jews, particularly in Zagreb, the Slovenian jingoists and the Czech, Polish, and Russian émigrés".9

Yet the crucial information on cross-border sabotage efforts came from the Abwehr substation in Klagenfurt, which was headed by prominent Carinthian Nazi (and German national post-war activist) Karl Fritz.10 Fritz informed the Gestapo about the smuggling of explosives across the Karavanke, a matter that (due to a double agent) his own organiza-tion had been involved in since at least April 1940. The agent in question was Alexander Herbst, a junk goods dealer with multiple criminal convictions and a number of solid, if not always legal, business contacts in the Alps-Adriatic region. Herbst had already worked as a confidant for the Austrian Kriminalpolizei prior to 1938 and had been acting as a courier and buyer for the Abwehr station in Salzburg since the fall of 1939.11 Once an Abwehr substation had been formed under Fritz, Herbst served as its informant for the infiltration of Nazi opponents in the "Ostmark" and in Slovenia.12

8 The reports can be found in the Himmler Collection: NARA-RG 242, Entry (E) 27, Box (B) 19a.9 NARA-RG 242, E 27, B 19a, Folder (F) 173-b-20-12/1, VI D 2, Yugoslavia, 26. 2. 1940.10 The Salzburg Abwehr station was responsible for combating attacks of espionage, sabotage and disruption

on troops and all relevant bodies of the national defense military district XVIII (Styria, Carinthia, Tyrol, Salzburg) (Brammer, 1989, 11). For more on the Abwehr substations in Klagenfurt and Graz, see: Vodušek Starič, 2002. According to Fritz, the Abwehr substation in Klagenfurt was created "due to the tense situation with Yugoslavia". (KLA-LGK, a. u. 20Vr1923/46, Staatspolizei, Niederschrift mit Karl Fritz, 11. 6. 1946). The Wehrmacht Archive in Klagenfurt was a hidden outpost for German intelligence, presumably for the SD Foreign Intelligence Service. Besides information gathering, the SD also kept watch on the Yugoslavian consulate. It did, however, also have co-operators which provided the Yugoslavians with information as to the identity of German agents in Slovenia. It is along these lines that Emil Wedam, interpreter for the Wehrmacht Archive, and Maria Tomasch (his liason to the Yugoslavian posts) were sentenced to death for treason by the People’s Court (Volksgerichtshof) and executed in May of 1943 (SDB, a. u. Urteil 6L 42/43 – 2J 462/41g, Volksgerichtshof, Urteil gegen Emil Wedam und Maria Tomasch, 14. 5. 1943).

11 KLA-LGK, a. u. 20Vr1925/46, Letter from Alexander Herbst to investigative judge Dr. Philadelphy, Kla-genfurt 16. 12. 1946.

12 KLA-LGK, a. u. 20Vr1923/46, Staatspolizei, Niederschrift mit Karl Fritz, 11. 6. 1946.


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In Klagenfurt, Herbst succeeded in convincing Yugoslavian consulate official Karl Širok of his desire to participate in the anti-German struggle. Širok integrated Herbst into the sabotage network, where he connected him with a subversive "border runner" by the name of Anton Ivančič. The connection to Ivančič precipitated in at least three meetings between Herbst, a second Klagenfurt double agent and Slovenian activists in the sabotage network (besides Ivančič, Ferdo Kravanja and Danilo Zelen) on the Wurzenpass. Result-ing from these, Herbst was put in charge of explosives materials, weapons and money for attacks he had supposedly planned himself; in reality, he delivered the material to Karl Fritz. All of this information from the Abwehr substation Klagenfurt – Širok also gave Herbst the name of Ivan Rudolf, director of the Slovenian organization "Bran-i-bor" and a central liaison for the D Section in Ljubljana – alerted the RSHA to the existence of a larger, transnational subversive organization. Reinhard Heydrich, head of the RSHA, sent his special commission to Yugoslavia twice in the summer of 1940 in an attempt to capture "saboteurs and terrorists", as well as the "supporters and initiators" presumed to be among the members of the British community in Yugoslavia and among Yugoslavian security authorities.

The latter was obvious due to the involvement of Karl Širok. Exiled Austrians in Yu-goslavia came less into question as organizers, as the foreign bureau of the Revolutionary Socialists of Austria in Maribor had been banned since Hans Hladnik’s13 escape to Eng-land in the spring of 1939, and by 1939, the KPÖ underground border-running organiza-tions had for the most part been crushed (Halbrainer, 2010, 45). In late December 1940, the RSHA special commission summarized the findings of investigations and police inter-rogations in Styria, Carinthia and Yugoslavia in a 200-page secret police study entitled "Sabotage and Terrorist Organization in Ostmark".14 The study reveals how the primary purpose of the RSHA’s intervention in Yugoslavia was to purge the Yugoslavian police and security apparatus of anti-German and British influence. Though the commission report complains about the inadequate, only pretended full cooperation of Yugoslavian agents, the Yugoslavian head of government Dragisa Cvetković did respond to German pressure by removing the pro-British Minister of the Interior Stanoje Mihaldžić from office, interning politically active Slovene exiles from northeast Italy, indicting several of the TIGR’s most active members and expelling scores of British citizens and German exiles suspected of belonging to the sabotage organization.

13 Styrian socialist and trade unionist Hans Hladnik had been smuggling illegal socialist propaganda (in-cluding the Arbeiter Zeitung) from Marburg into Austria since 1934 under the tolerance of Yugoslavian authorities. Hladnik had already left for England in the spring of 1939, probably because he saw no possible way to continue his operations. In England he was registered as a refugee in 1939, in other words before the D Section became active in Yugoslavia. Hladnik was later employed by the Austrian Section of the British Special Operations Executive (TNA-HS-9/717/2, Personnel File – PF – Hans Hladnik).

14 PA-AA,. a. u. R 100734, RSHA IV A 2, Vol. 3362/40g tied to IV A 2a – Vol. 722/40 gRs., Sabotage und Terrororganisation in der Ostmark, Berlin, 28. 12. 1940.



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THE ROLE OF GERMAN EXILES

The RSHA study makes no mention of the part German-speaking exiles played in the early militant anti-German resistance. Based on British files, the following pages will investigate who the most important German-speaking exiles in this transnational sub-versive network were and what roles they assumed in these operations. First, we would have to begin by naming Julius Hanau as a central and inspiring figure in the D Section in Yugoslavia.15 Hanau was from a South African Jewish family, he was a British citizen and had converted to the Anglican Church. Since the end of the First World War, during which he had served as a British soldier, he had lived as a successful businessman and legal adviser in Belgrade. Hanau was a well-traveled man: He was familiar with all of the European countries, including Russia, and his journeys had taken him everywhere from South and North America to North and South Africa. Besides English, he spoke fluent French, Serbian, Spanish, Dutch and Zulu. Hanau had excellent political contacts in Belgrade and quickly came to the attention of German agents, to which he evidently embodied the prototypical, anti-Semitic cliché of a Jewish string-puller with designs on world domination. Hanau knew how to protect himself: When he was denounced as a British agent in the 17 December 1939 edition of the Völkische Beobachter, the issue was confiscated in Yugoslavia.16

Besides Britons employed in both diplomatic and cultural institutions and business-es, Hanau’s organization also included Yugoslavian businesspeople, language teachers, journalists, politicians, and intellectuals as well as Polish, Czechoslovakian, and German refugees. Organizational bases for the several, largely autonomous cells in the network emerged in Ljubljana, Maribor, Zagreb, and Belgrade. With the help of German Social Democrat Jakob Altmaier, Hanau also enjoyed the support of one of the most renowned journalists in the Weimar Republic. Altmaier had, among others, written for Kurt Tuchol-sky’s Weltbühne, the Manchester Guardian as its German correspondent, for the Sozial-demokratischer Pressedienst and had reported for the Vorwärts out of Belgrade, Paris and London. The National Socialist takeover and the regime’s anti-Semitic politics forced Altmaier to leave the country. Between 1933 and 1937, he reported for the Manchester Guardian and Le Populaire – mostly from Paris, but also over the course of several stays in Yugoslavia, primarily in Belgrade – followed by several reports from Spain on the raging civil war between Fascists and Republicans. Altmaier had already contributed to British-backed, anti-fascist exile resistance efforts in the spring of 1938, when he coop-erated with the "Sender der Deutschen Freiheitspartei" (German Freedom Party Radio). Based on a British ship in the English Channel, resistance activists broadcast to Germany in an attempt to enlighten the German population about the "true nature of the NSDAP". Among other things, the station reported on the German "Legion Condor" and its contri-bution to the Spanish Civil War, which the Nazi regime denied (Watt, 1991). It is possible that Altmaier’s association with the new British institutions for psychological and sub-

15 TNA-HS 9/653/2, PF Julius Hanau.16 NARA-RG 242, E 27, B 19a, F 173-b-20-12/1, VM 6786, Transcript, Belgrade, n.d.


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versive warfare developed from journalistic connections. A number of British journalists were involved in the psychological warfare efforts or propaganda offices, many of them former correspondents on the continent. When exactly Altmaier defected from Paris to Belgrade is unclear. He did, in any event, have close contacts within the Serbian Agrar-ian party in Serbia. He supported its program of a South Slav federation of Serbs, Croats, Slovenes and Bulgarians on the basis of rural cooperatives (Moß, 2003, 163).17

The Serbian Agrarian party opposed the Yugoslavian government’s dependence on the Axis powers and advocated an alliance with Britain and the Soviet Union, making them especially interesting to the D Section as a partner. Altmaier put D Section agents in contact with its leading politician Milan Gavrilović, and transferred his wealth of knowl-edge to this transnational subversive context: Besides his command of languages, social skills, political contacts, and journalistic brilliance, Altmaier’s own revolutionary experi-ences from November of 1918 in Frankfurt and German social democratic party propa-ganda proved helpful to this end.

A second German exile, agricultural economist Alfred Becker (born 1898) of Meck-lenburg, assumed a very similar mediating and translating role. Becker may have been even more directly and intensively involved with Hanau’s subversive activities than Alt-maier – he had a personnel file with the D Section and the Special Operations Executive (SOE), its successor organization. Becker had also been a child of the German social de-mocracy. His father, Lord of the Manor Arthur Becker, had played a key role in the Revo-lution of 1918 in Pomerania, served as an SPD representative official for land reform and was active in the German League for Human Rights (Wilhelmus, 2007, 67). Like his father, Becker vehemently opposed Prussian Junkerdom. He was driven out of house and home when the NSDAP seized power and he fled to Yugoslavia via the Netherlands and France. Becker had been living in Yugoslavia with his family since 1936 and conducted scientific experiments for the Yugoslavian Ministry of Agriculture. He evidently offered his services to British representatives in Belgrade as early as May of 1939, in other words before the start of the war, and was recruited by Hanau the following fall.18 Becker identi-fied himself politically as a Social Democrat and wrote in his résumé regarding his "ex-traction": "Because these things play a role today: I am a so-called ‘non-Arian’".19

In all likelihood, Becker and Altmaier worked together in the fall of 1939 on the anti-Nazi Croatian-language magazine Alarm, anti-Nazi pamphlets addressing Danube Swabians as well as other anti-Nazi (and also anti-communist) fliers in editions of up to 10,000. The two social democratic exiles were further responsible for the production of the German newspaper Deutsche Mitteilungen and Srpski informacije, its Serbian coun-terpart.20 Once the illegal propaganda work in Croatia and Serbia was taken over by local partners, Altmaier and Becker increasingly turned their attention to producing German-

17 Altmaier was to return to Germany in 1949, even though the majority of his family had been murdered in Nazi concentration camps. The only Jewish member of the Bundestag (SPD), he negotiated the 1952 Luxemburg "Restitution Agreement" between Germany and Israel (cf. von Jena, 1986).

18 TNA-HS 9/112/4, PF Alfred Becker, Record Sheet, 14. 3. 1945.19 TNA-HS 9/112/4, PF Alfred Becker, Vita Alfred Heinrich Hugo Julius Becker, 23. 5. 1939.20 TNA-HS 7/4, History 3A, D section, Slovene Organization.



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language social democratic and Catholic propaganda, which was then smuggled to Aus-tria and Germany via Slovenia and Hungary.21 In late January 1940, Becker was appre-hended by the Belgrade police for the distribution of illegal propaganda. Though Hanau managed to secure his propagandist’s speedy release, he did instruct Becker to avoid any direct contact with him for a while. At the same time, according to Hanau, Becker could continue his work, "which is indispensable to our Deutsche Mitteilungen and socialist propaganda going into Austria".22 Becker was also directly involved in acts of sabotage, including infecting Germany-bound cattle deliveries with foot-and-mouth disease.23

What was more effective and sustainable was Becker’s liaison work in Ljubljana, where Hanau sent him in December 1939 to help build a Slovenian organization for the D Section.24 Becker is said to have acquainted Hanau with leading activists of the anti-fascist, national-liberal Slovenian underground in the Littoral (Primorska), including Albert Rejec. Rejec took over the task of expanding the D Section’s propaganda and sabo-tage network in the "Ostmark" (Earle, 2005, 26). Similar to Altmaier in the case of the Serbian opposition, Becker served as a middleman between British D Section agents and the Slovenian anti-fascist underground on both sides of the Yugoslavian-Italian border. An evaluation of Becker’s work for the D Section shows particular appreciation for his ability to direct the Slovenian activists to intervene in Austria: "Assisted greatly in secur-ing the collaboration of SLOVENE émigrés from ISTRIA who were used for propaganda and sabotage in Austria".25

Altmaier and Becker were among the few German exiles prepared to fight Nazi Ger-many on the side of the Western powers immediately after the war began, also using military means. Other examples include Karl Retzlaw, the former Spartakist, KPD co-founder/co-operator and Komintern dissenter (one of the same politically stateless profes-sional revolutionaries Manès Sperber so impressively describes in his "Like a Tear in the Ocean"); the later editor of the Frankfurter Rundschau Karl Gerold26 and Gregor Sebba, a Viennese political scientist (Pirker, 2010, 52; Pirker, 2009, 253).27

What purpose did these activities by subversive intellectuals in exile serve, where did their value lie? Sabotage could do nothing to stop Germany in 1940; its players were of

21 TNA-HS 9/112/4, PF Alfred Becker, Yugoslavia, 23. 3. 1940.22 TNA-HS 9/112/4, PF Alfred Becker, From Caesar [Hanau] to D. H., 1. 2. 1940.23 Confirmation of this can be found in a letter from the District Authority of Cilli to all commanders of police

stations in Slovenia, dated 3. 2. 1940 (NARA, RG 242, E 27, B 19a, F 173-b-20-12/1, Abschrift der Über-setzung, Bez. Hauptmannschaft Cilli an alle Kommandanten der Gendarmerieposten, Vert. Zl. 135/1, 3. 2. 1940).

24 TNA-HS-9/112/4, PF Alfred Becker, From Caesar [Hanau] to D. H., 1. 2. 1940.25 TNA-HS-9/112/4, PF Alfred Becker, Record Sheet, 14. 3. 1945. On the network in Slovenia see Pirker,

2010, 138.26 Retzlaw and Gerold founded the militant underground group LEX from French and Swiss exile. The group

cooperated with the D Section/SOE in sabotage and propaganda efforts within the Third Reich between 1939 and 1944 (cf. Pirker, 2010, 93). With regard to regular warfare, one would have to note the German-speaking defectors in the British army, who served in the war against Germany from France in 1940 (cf. Sanders, 2008).

27 For the collaboration of German seamen with the D Section see Nelles, 2001.


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course aware of that. The D Section files show time and again that these subversive acts were viewed as having the moral value of showing and encouraging an assiduous spirit of resistance against Germany. The D Section’s organization in Yugoslavia was largely destroyed by RSHA interventions in the July of 1940. Altmaier and Becker had to once again take a step back from the Nazis. This is not to say that they abandoned the struggle; both continued – in the "no surrender" sense of the word – the fight against Germany with the SOE, which was established in July 1940 by Winston Churchill as a means of rein-forcing the subversive warfare. Altmaier did this first as a propagandist in Greece, later as a Balkan expert at the British headquarters for the Middle East in Cairo. In late 1940 in Istanbul, Becker was able to involve a handful of Austrians in subversive British warfare – for the first time outside the UK –, including the former Social Affairs Minister Josef Dobretsberger and Styrian manufacturer and communist Herbert Feuerlöscher.28 In this extremely difficult phase of the fight against Nazi Germany, the SOE agents (especially the exiles among them) epitomized an unbroken will to resist, opposed resignation, and in doing so communicated a strong position that supported pro-Western partisanship, among the refugees and local anti-fascists in particular. Their many years of experience in exile in various European countries made them old hands at adapting to new social contexts, where they quickly emerged as players – also through the support of their respective Brit-ish communities. This distinguished them from many Austrian refugees, who had many difficulties adapting in the first years after the exodus, be it in Paris, London or Istanbul, and were hardly in a position to become offensively involved in the Western war efforts.

DECONSTRUCTING NATIONAL MYTHS

A closer look at the British documents describing the attempts of Hanau and his man in Ljubljana, English lecturer Alexander Lawrenson, to expand the D Section organiza-tion into the German Reich reveals that they clearly envisaged more than just Carinthia’s Slovenian population as a connection.29 From the British point of view, the Slovenian activists from the Littoral should primarily target two political camps with pro-Austrian propaganda: Socialists and Catholics.30 Lawrenson naturally tried to activate organized structures within the highly Catholic-conservative Carinthian Slovenes with the help of Juri Felaher, his contact in Ljubljana. The president of the Carinthian Slovenes’ Club/Klub Koroških Slovenec (KKS) did manage to collect some information for the British from Carinthia, though, according to both British and German records, he was unable to find any willingness for militant resistance. At that time, Carinthian Slovene representa-tives were hoping to find a compromise with the Nazi regime (Sima, 2000, 749).31

28 TNA-HS 9/116/6, PF Oscar Behron, Free Austrians, From D/H98 to D/H31, 6. 12. 1944; cf. Pirker, 2009, 360.

29 TNA-HS 7/4, History 3A, D section, Slovene Organization; TNA-HS-9/112/4, PF Alfred Becker, From Caesar [Hanau] to D. H., 1. 2. 1940; TNA-HS-7/3, D section, Balkans, Early History to September 1940; TNA-HS 5/965, D Section, Yugoslavia, Memorandum on successes obtained by Croatian agents and orga-nizations working for S.O.2.

30 TNA-HS-7/4, History 3A, D section, Slovene Organization.31 For more detailed information on Felaher see Stergar, 2005.



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The outcome in Carinthia and Styria was more or less the same for Anton Ivančič and Ferdo Kravanja, two subversive border-crossers from the TIGR cell in Jesenice. Ap-proaching the at one-time socialist (since 1934 Communist-leaning) railway men and workers in Villach brought no positive results, nor did attempts to tie into the illegal CP’s reorganisation in the Klagenfurt area.32 Only Gregor Gabriel, a farmer from Rosental close to the border who had ties to the illegal communist leader Kilian Schauss, was willing to become more involved in the endeavor. The young "border runner" Alois Knes [Knez] from Maria Gail, a relative of Gabriel’s, found trustworthy support among close relatives and acquaintances (German and Slovenian-speaking) in his home town. Knes had deserted his Wehrmacht barracks in Salzburg over the New Year 1939–1940 and fled to Slovenia with the help of Anton Tuder, the village’s formerly socialist mayor.33 Though Knes’ supporters certainly stood in the local, anti-fascist tradition of the workers and railwaymen milieu, they apparently had no ties to illegal cadres of the Communist Party or other underground political contexts, nor did they seem willing to make any. Tuder, for example, refused deeper cooperation on several occasions. The same thing happened in Upper Styria. Even there – far beyond the mixed-language Carinthian Region – Ferdo Kravanja, Anton Ivančič and Alois Knes only succeeded in building a sabotage and es-pionage cell over personal and familial relations. It consisted of Franz Ivančič, Anton’s brother, who lived and worked in Judenburg and his close friend and work colleague Engelbert Glitzner, who instigated bombing attacks on the Southern Railway as well as several espionage missions. Both were doubtlessly Nazi opponents; Ivančič was a mem-ber of the christian social home guard in the early 1930s and Glitzner’s sympathies had been with the communists since 1934 – without becoming more conspicuous politically. Glitzner also failed to secure the hoped-for contacts to communist comrades in the Upper Styrian industrial area.

Many decades later, Carinthian historian August Walzl explained the communists’ refusal to cooperate as the result of their strong Austrian patriotism. This point of view will be addressed in the following, because Walzl’s in many respects problematic work on anti-Nazi resistance in Carinthia, Slovenia and Friuli has thus far been the only sys-tematic, German-language examination of resistance in the Alps-Adriatic region.34 With regard to the British and Slovenian involvement, Walzl characterized even the attacks themselves – in a complete misrepresentation of Nazi Germany’s expansion politics and misunderstanding of the geopolitical context – as the "first foreign intervention" (Walzl, 1994, 69). Seen in light of this evidently German nationalist lens of interpretation, what is even more bizarre is when Walzl tries to argue the communists’ "Austrian consciousness" in order to interpret their refusal to cooperate with the Slovenian activists: "In no way did

32 After the 1934 banning of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (SDAP) and the February defeat by the Austrofascist Dollfuss regime, many Socialists turned to the more radical, likewise illegal Austrian Com-munist Party. This was widely true of the workers’ milieu in Villach.

33 Confirmation of Knes’ desertion can be found in a secret circular letter concerning the combating of treason (NARA-RG 242, E 27, B 11, F 173-b-16-12/48, RSHA IV E, Geheimes Sammelrundschreiben über Lan-desverratsbekämpfung, 15. 10. 1940).

34 With a very strong biographical, less historiographical and scholarly focus cf. Baum, 2010.


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they want to be the henchmen of the Secret Service or Slovene groups and identify with their objectives – objectives clearly at odds with their Austrian consciousness, especially as they were also unclear as to what the Slovenian interests were" (Walzl, 1994, 72). Walzl’s sources included accounts from KPÖ official Josef Nischelwitzer, survivor of the Mauthausen concentration camp and longtime editor-in-chief of the daily newspaper Volkswille, and Max Muchitsch, who was active in the Upper Styrian partisan group Leoben-Donawitz. Looking at these sources however, one notices that neither Nisch-elwitzer nor Muchitsch cites the involvement of Slovenian activists as the cause of the communists’ reserved attitude (KPÖ Kärnten, 1988, 80; Muchitsch 1985, 118). This was obviously added by Walzl in order to construct an explanation in accordance with the na-tional Carinthian historico-political prisma and its notorious focus on Slovenian claims to territory. By contrast, British and German documents indicate that the reasons for the low appeal of Slovenian activist efforts were political-ideological and not national-political in nature. The propaganda smuggled into Carinthia advocated partisanship in favor of the Western democracies in the war against Germany.35 This position was in stark contrast to the communists’ previous party line, which had been neutral to the "imperialist" war since the Hitler-Stalin pact. Schauss’ views reflected this as well; one of his fliers from that time reads: "The Austrian and German working classes [...] will not allow themselves to be misled by Goebbels’ propaganda of lies from Berlin, but also not from the worshipers of the bourgeois democracy of London and Paris".36 The communists’ willingness to attack German warfare actively in support of any allied war effort came only after the Nazi inva-sion of the Soviet Union.

D Section agents responsible for Austria in London also took an Austrian nationalist position and made a conscious attempt to cultivate anti-German sentiment with their sub-versive propaganda (cf. Pirker, 2010, 88). This aspect would also make it seem that Ger-man judicial records, which indicate an Austrian nationalist slant in circulated fliers of the Jesenice TIGR cell, are in fact correct. In no source, nor in the numerous German court records, is there any mention that Slovene activists within the German Reich pursued or advocated irredentist objectives as they did in the Littoral. Looking at the oral agreement between the Slovenian irredentists and Hanau about their subversive cooperation – as presented in a 1943 memorandum by Ivan Maria Čok to the Foreign Office – though it does mention the merger of Trieste, Gorizia and Istria to Yugoslavia, there is no talk of territorial claims to parts of Carinthia.37

Nischelwitzer and Muchitsch used another topos. According to their accounts, the Austrian communists repelled the British Secret Service’s attempts to "harness" them for British purposes. Yet both authors offered important accounts of the communist re-sistance against the Nazi regime in Austria. It is therefore worth noting that neither men-tioned Glitzner’s attacks on the railway and the large Reich Military Court trial in Kla-

35 SDB, Ojs 107/41, Generalstaatsanwalt, Anklageverfügung gegen Gregor Gabriel, 12. 8. 1941.36 DÖW, a. u. 19793/125, Volksgerichtshof, Verdict against Schauß, Killian among others.37 TNA-FO 371/37629 R 2619/230/92, Committee of the Yugoslavs from Italy to Anthony Eden, New York,

28. 3. 1943.



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genfurt against Glitzner, the Slovenian activists Anton Ivančič and Ferdo Kravanja and the Maria Gail Group, even though the court denounced and condemned many of them as communists.

At the same time, it is problematic to classify the Maria Gail group and the Judenburg cell as TIGR activists or to call them the forerunners of a Slovenian autochthonous re-sistance. Only two arguments can be brought in here: First, Ferdo Kravanja’s and Anton Ivančič’s activities within the German Reich were – according to all sources and research findings thus far – entirely different from the national political struggle against fascism in the Italian coastal region. Second, in as much as they are known, most activities within the German Reich were exclusively activities performed on the D Section’s initiative. All sabotage, espionage and propaganda activities that appear in the sources and in research suggest that they were aiming to develop an "Austrian" organization, to lead Knes and other "agents" to Salzburg, Upper Austria and to perform propaganda and sabotage even in the "Altreich". Whether these subversive journeys mentioned in British, German and Slovenian documents (cf. Jevnikar, 1998, 238) were actually carried out is irrelevant here. It at least shows their direction and intention.

It would, however, be inaccurate to speak of an "exploitation" of TIGR by the D Sec-tion as the cooperation was based on shared interests: weakening the German war effort, attacking the connection between Germany, Italy and Yugoslavia, and reinforcing the Western democracies’ position in the war. The relationship between the D Section and the activists from the coast could be better described as a kind of transnational service for the establishment of sabotage and resistance cells in the borderlands of the German Reich, an area of operations where locally adept, multilingual "border runners" could act where British agents could not.38 In return, they were promised political support for a revision of the Italian-Yugoslav border after the war, weapons, ammunition, explosives, and financial backing for their particular struggle against the fascist regime in the coastal region. The anti-German and anti-fascist resistance in Yugoslavia and northeastern Italy should, in following the D Section’s strategies, become inspiring examples for the European coun-tries threatened by German expansion. It was a transnational anti-fascist work agreement, albeit one with a number of structural problems. One of these should be mentioned briefly here: The quality of assessments as to the political situation was based on information from a scarcely manageable news chain from Jesenice to Ljubljana to Belgrade to Lon-don – one in which every link had a structural interest in giving positive reports about the way work was progressing in order to legitimize its own material needs. Looking, for example, at the number of sabotage attacks in Austria claimed by the Balkan Department of the D Section in London,39 one notes a glaring discrepancy between that figure and the number of attacks German judicial authorities charged members of the sabotage organiza-

38 The first two trained British-Austrian agents to be sent to Yugoslavia by the SOE (the D Section’s successor organization) in February 1941 were Theodor Schubauer and Franz Preiss. Schubauer, the Social Demo-crat, was the former captain of the Vienna Municipal Guard, Preiss, a young Sudeten-German socialist. The British ship in which they were traveling was torpedoed off the coast of West Africa; both men drowned

39 TNA-HS 8/214, D Section, Great Britain’s only successful experiment in total warfare, Appendix III.


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tion with.40 Even checking these against other sources, daily newspapers or chronicles, for example, one could safely conclude that attacks had been "invented" to prove the ef-ficiency of the sabotages (cf. Pirker, 2010, 220). Based on this information, the D Section gave political decision makers in London not only the impression of working relations with a socialist underground and a Slovenian organization in Austria, but also that there was potential in Austria for developing militant resistance.41

Although the D Section’s development of a transnational resistance network between 1938 and 1940 was characterized by many teething problems, this is where the founda-tion for future cooperation between resistance movements, exile organizations, and allied intelligence agencies was laid. These transnational relationships, though successful to varying degrees, were essential for espionage, sabotage, guerilla fighting, and building escape routes in the struggle against German domination in Europe (Moore, 2000, 8). These should become more of a focus in research investigations on resistance, also as a means to cast a critical eye on national mythologizing.

THE TRIAL AT THE REICH MILITARY COURT IN KLAGENFURT

The RSHA’s findings were grounds for several court proceedings in Vienna and Kla-genfurt against originally thirty-seven indicted individuals of German, Italian and Yugo-slavian nationality. The primary defendants42 fell under the military jurisdiction that had been reintroduced in 1933/34 by the coalition government of National Socialists and Ger-man Nationalists. In 1939, shortly before the start of the war, a series of special provisions such as the Decree Concerning Special Military Crimes during the War (Kriegssonder-strafrechtsverordnung – KSSVO) and the Decree Concerning Military Jurisdiction dur-ing the War (Kriegsstrafenverfahrensordnung – KStVO) were introduced as a means of drastically tightening and adapting the justice system in accordance with the Wehrmacht leadership and adjusting it to suit Nazi ideology. The aim was to nip any doubt and criti-cism of the war, insufficient sacrifice, desertion, and sabotage of the war effort in the bud. Nazi and Wehrmacht leadership considered the military justice’s failure to suppress insurgent and mutinying soldiers in 1918 a major cause of Germany’s defeat. Now any form of dissent against the war, or any whiff of it, would be harshly persecuted and the "Volksgemeinschaft" would be wiped clean of it from the start (cf. Garbe, 2011).43 In July 1941 in Klagenfurt, at the largest Reich Military Court trial in the "Ostmark" to date,

40 In addition to the cited judicial records, evidence of this is also found in situation reports from the NS judi-ciary in Austria (Form, Uthe, 2004, 336).

41 TNA-HS 8/214, D section, Foreign Organisations, with which this section is in contact, n.d. [summer 1940].

42 Engelbert Glitzner, Franz and Anton Ivančič, Ferdo Kravanja, Franz and Anna Knes, Konrad Lipusch, Martin Čemernjak, Franz Melcher, Josef and Maria Reiterer, Anna Glitzner, Leopoldine Schnedl, Theresia Knes (cf. SDB, a. u. StPL (RKA) I 118/41, Reichskriegsgericht, Anklageverfügung gegen Engelbert Glitz-ner u. a. 25. 6. 1941).

43 The Wehrmacht military court gave a total 25,000 to 30,000 death sentences, of which 18,000 to 22,000 were carried out. For more detailed information on the numbers, see Messerschmidt, 2005, 168, 453.



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Senate President Karl Schmauser sentenced six defendants to death, the others to several years of prison. Two of the activists the RSHA held most responsible for the sabotage organization were on the run: Alois Knes and Ferdo Kravanja.

One striking feature of the charges and judgment certificates is that the rulings are not based on proof of certain, concrete actions, but on the assessment of a political attitude. The entire organization was deemed communist by the court, though an examination of Anton and Franz Ivančič as well as Ferdo Kravanja’s biographies showed no evidence of communist leanings. The Reichkriegsgericht (RKG) classified several of the Carinthian defendants as fanatical communists all the more. For the court, the communist classifica-tion was considered complete proof of the individual’s full participation in acts of sabo-tage. What mattered to the court was the endeavor – in other words the will, the intention or a so-called inner consent to the act. And in the event of a communist attitude, this was considered to be a given.44 The construction of a communist sentiment in Anton Ivančič was the cause of considerable difficulty in a subsequent trial at the Volksgerichtshof, when the judges tried to explain the failed cooperation between him and Anton Tuder, who had also been called a communist.45 The prosecutor also identified Konrad Lipusch and the parents of Alois Knes as Slovenes; this clearly pejorative attribution was at first missing in Martin Čemernjak’s record, though the evidence of his Slovenian native lan-guage was added to his sentence later. The fact that Franz Knes and Konrad Lipusch had been decorated many times in the First World War and had voluntarily participated in the struggle against Yugoslav forces in the border conflict in 1919 did little to help them.46 Wherever it could, the court also stressed the defendants’ alleged "anti-social" and infe-rior natures, which were deemed detrimental to the "Volksgemeinschaft". In general, the Reich Military Court – shortly after the start of the attack on the Soviet Union – sought to represent the sabotage organization as a communist enterprise organized by Yugoslav and British secret intelligence agencies under command of the "English Jew Hanau", with the aim of "paving the way for a coup and undermining the resilience of the German people".47

The nature of the charge reflects the ideological delusion of Nazism: a secret alliance between Western democracies and communism, masterminded by Jews to annihilate the Germans. In comparision with the "Special Tribunal for the Security of the State" in Trieste in December 1941, which was conducted at least partly in order to prosecute sabotage attacks commited in 1940 by TIGR activists, there are a number of interesting differences (cf. Verginella, 2000, 157). Like the Reich Military Court, the fascist tribunal took similar pains to emphasize the connections and cooperation between the clearly po-

44 SDB, a. u. StPL (HLS) III 57/41 – StPL (RKA) I 118/41, Reichskriegsgericht, Feldurteil gegen Engelbert Glitzner u. a., 25. 7. 1941, 42.

45 SDB, a. u. Urteil 2H 3/42 – 6J 101/41g, Volksgerichtshof, Urteil gegen Franz Monsberger und Anton Tuder.46 SDB, a. u. StPL (RKA) I 118/41, Reichskriegsgericht, Anklageverfügung gegen Engelbert Glitzner u. a. 25.

6. 1941, 17.47 SDB, a. u. StPL (RKA) I 118/41, Reichskriegsgericht, Anklageverfügung gegen Engelbert Glitzner u. a. 25.

6. 1941, 9, 23, 51; a. u. StPL (HLS) III 57/41 – StPL (RKA) I 118/41, Reichskriegsgericht, Feldurteil gegen Engelbert Glitzner u. a., 25. 7. 1941, 11, 37.


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litically, organizationally and socially heterogeneous defendants and to attribute these to a "single organizational mind".48 Unlike the Reich Military Court, the Trieste trial did not forefront communism as the primary enemy. Instead it trotted out irredentism, Slovenian exiles in Yugoslavia, the Yugoslav government, and the British "Intelligence Service" as the unifying elements. Though the Klagenfurt trial had no charges related to any irre-dentist agendas, they were the main focus of the trials in Trieste. While the Nazi press in Carinthia did not report on the Reich Military Court (probably to prevent worry about the strength of the "home front" during the Wehrmacht advances in the Soviet Union) Italy’s fascist government staged the military tribunal as a show trial that was heavily covered by the media – even within the German Reich (Kärntner Grenzruf, 17. 12. 1941). There could have been three reasons for this: firstly, to demonstrate the fascist regime’s strength, secondly, the tribunal was to have a deterrent effect on the Slovenian population. A third element may have been an interest in attuning the Italian population to war against Great Britain for supremacy in the Mediterranean.49

In the "Ostmark", it was the business of the SS Sicherheitsdienst (SD) to connect lead-ing Carinthian Slovenes to the sabotage organization. As early as July 1940, even before the results of the RSHA investigations were available, the SD identified the "national Slovenian clergy" and the Slovenian Cultural Association as responsible for the attacks. They had, according to the SD, "created the mindset required to commit these kind of sabotage".50 In response, the SD demanded to break their influence and strengthen their control of Slovenian youth.

POLITICS OF MEMORY OR: THE LONG PATH FROM OSTRACISM TO REHA-BILITATION

In conclusion, I would like to shed some light on how postwar societies in Austria and Slovenia have dealt with the history of this early transnational sabotage organization. The following begins with a brief comparison of the politics of memory, in other words the question as to how this early anti-fascist and anti-Nazi resistance was and is thought of today and how it has been interpreted. Several historians have pointed out in recent years that the early liberal-national resistance in the Littoral was devalued in socialist Slovenia on account of its connection with the Western powers. Instead, activists from TIGR and later cooperators in Western military missions in Slovenia were denounced and sometimes persecuted as "agents" and "spies". Some of them had already been liquidated by the Yugoslav secret police (OZNA) in 1945 (Bajc, Torkar, 2009; Bajc, 2007, Deželak-Barič, 2000; Earle, 2005). The politics of memory followed, to some extent, the

48 TNA-371/37629 R 2619/230/92, Commentary on Trieste-Trial against 71 Slovenes over Radio Rome, 10. 12. 1941 by Rino Alessi, official Fascist commentator.

49 TNA-371/37629 R 2619/230/92, Commentary on Trieste-Trial against 71 Slovenes over Radio Rome, 10. 12. 1941 by Rino Alessi, official Fascist commentator.

50 SDB, Meldungen aus dem Reich (Nr. 107), 22. 7. 1942. Originally published in: Boberach, 1984, 1402–1412.



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tendency during the liberation struggle to subordinate non-communist anti-fascism to the dominance of the Communist Party of Slovenia (KPS) within the Liberation Front of the Slovene People (Osvobodilna fronta).

The situation in Austria was a different one altogether. As we know, there was no anti-Nazi resistance in Austria that came close to the liberation movement in Slovenia. The memory politics in Austria were however similar, if under different circumstances. Here, the lack of denazification, the swift return of former Nazis to public and political life, as well as the rapid restoration of anti-Slavic German nationalism (cf. Knight, 2007) led – after a short phase of capitalizing on the resistance in international negotiations on the future of Austria – to the situation, that the executed resistance fighters and victims of Nazi persecution were hardly being commemorated at all. Instead, the honors went al-most exclusively to the fallen soldiers of the Wehrmacht. The initiative for this came from veterans of the Wehrmacht, who glorified their military service in an attempt to compen-sate for the humiliation of defeat. The repression of addressing criminal warfare came as an emphasis on supposedly timeless soldierly values of "fulfillment of duty", "honor", "obedience", and "loyalty". Though its principles ran counter to the official representa-tion of the Austrians as victims of Nazi Germany, the veteran’s view of history quickly became hegemonial. But their public celebration required a few semantic shifts: The fight for Nazi Germany became a struggle for the "homeland," the war of attack became a war of defense (Manoschek, 2010, 36).

In Carinthia especially, the memory of the Second World War was associated with the so-called "Abwehrkampf" (the national border struggle following the First World War), and emphasized the continuity of a necessary anti-Slav struggle in defense of the "Heimat". The handling of those executed and murdered for belonging to the "sabotage and terrorist organization in Ostmark" is a characteristic example. In Maria Gail, a dis-pute started over the question about which dead from the time between 1939 and 1945 should be publicly honored and commemorated in the form of a monument. One group of Wehrmacht veterans belonging to the right wing Federation of Independents (WdU, later FPÖ) advocated that the monument be dedicated only to the fallen soldiers of the First World War, those of the "Abwehrkampf," the Second World War and the civilian victims of the allied bombing attacks, while socialists and communists argued for an "anti-war memorial" that would also bear the names of resistance fighters and victims of Nazism. The Wehrmacht veterans rejected the latter on the grounds that they could not at all be portrayed as heroes and freedom fighters (Volkswille, 9. 8. 1953).

The veterans were finally able to erect the planned war memorial with support from the ÖVP, the christian democratic Austrian People’s Party. One of the two speakers at the unveiling was the former SS Sturmbannführer Karl Fritz, who in 1940 as head of the Abwehr substation in Klagenfurt was responsible for tracking the TIGR activists and their supporters in Maria Gail. In his speech, Fritz – now the People’s Party candidate for a mandate in the Carinthian state parliament – gave particular praise to the voluntary com-batants of the "Abwehrkampf" from 1919, to whom – which he did not mention – Franz Knes and Konrad Lipusch also belonged – two Nazi opponents who had been decapitated due to Fritz’s police work for the Nazi regime. Fritz closed his speech with a word of


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praise to the "iron resolve in the performance of duty" and the "loyalty to the home-land and its people". The word "Austria" is never mentioned in his address: He spoke of Carinthia and the goal of a united Europe – which was nothing more than a cipher for the very same German anti-communist hegemony on the continent already advocated in Nazi Germany. The second speaker was the WdU-representative Hans Rohr. Photographs of the ceremony show him proudly wearing the Knight’s Cross and other Wehrmacht medals on his breast. His speech was clearly directed against the former war opponents, whom he blamed for the bombing attacks and accused of revenge justice. In allusion to desert-ers and resistance fighters, he spoke of "traitors" on the home front and declared: "Today we know exactly where the decorum lies, with treason or with loyalty, and no one will doubt the sanctity of the oath again" (Allgemeine Bauern-Zeitung, 15. 8. 1953). For the veterans’ associations – the Austrian Comrades Association (Österreichischer Kamerad-schaftsbund – ÖKB) with hundreds of thousands of members, for example – the defama-tion of resistance fighters and Wehrmacht deserters as scoundrels, criminals, traitors and perjurers served to bolster their own positive identity building, and the restoration of their soldierly masculinity.

Though the hegemony of this ultimately positive reference to the Second World War was questioned in the wake of 1986 discussion about Kurt Waldheim and his "fulfillment of duty in the Wehrmacht", it was not shaken. This only occured later with the exhibition "War of Extermination. Crimes of the Wehrmacht", which was shown several times in Austria throughout the mid-1990s. The exhibition was furthermore an occasion to reas-sess National Socialism, particularly on the level of non-governmental, social and local initiatives. This reassessment was also crucial for the change in the way the Maria Gail group was remembered. At this stage, on private initiative of the association "Erinnern" in Villach, the first complete list of the Maria Gail residents executed for "treason and high treason" or murdered by the Nazis in concentration camps and prisons was com-piled (Lauritsch, 1994). Five years later, the same society realized its plan to list all those persecuted by the Nazi regime from Villach and the vicinity on a monument in the city center. In other words, it took over four decades to end the ostracism of Maria Gail mur-dered anti-fascists’ from public and cultural memory. In the case of the Styrian sabouteur Engelbert Glitzner, this form of public and cultural commemoration is still nonexistent. He has slipped completely into obscurity, despite his being one of the first militant resis-tance fighters in Austria. On the official political level, it was only in October 2009 that the Austrian Parliament – after many years of discussion and public pressure emerging with the exhibition "Was damals Recht war… Soldaten und Zivilisten vor Gerichten der Wehrmacht" – unambiguously rehabilitated all of the soldiers and civilians sentenced by the Wehrmacht judicial system (cf. Metzler, 2010).

Comparing the date of full rehabilitation in Austria with the course of the discussion on the rehabilitation of the TIGR and members of the Western parachute missions in post-socialist Slovenia, it is clear that it took Austria several years longer to completely end the discrimination after 1945. In Slovenia, the activists of the TIGR were rehabilitated in 1997 by the then President Milan Kučan. It should be noted, however, that recourse to the TIGR was within the context of a specific national historico-political discourse: a



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positive contrast to the Communist-dominated Liberation Front, which is burdened with the massacre of collaborators after the war. In a 2005 commemoration ceremony by lib-eral-conservative Prime Minister Janez Janša TIGR, was portrayed as prime, in a certain sense, "untainted" element of the anti-fascist liberation struggle. In a kind of fictitious view of history, it serves to preserve the importance of the national liberation struggle and to wish away the social revolution associated with it. In the words of Janez Janša: "TIGR is what the partisan movement would have been without the communist dominance in the struggle against the occupier" (Janša, 2005). Thus, the analysis of the politics of memory is always the analysis of predominant wishful thinking about the course of history.

NADNACIONALNI ODPOR V PROSTORU ALPE-JADRAN V LETIH 1939/40. O PREVRATNIŠKIH ČEZMEJNIH AKTIVISTIH,

ZGODOVINSKIH INTERPRETACIJAH IN NACIONALNIH POLITIKAH PRETEKLOSTI

Peter PIRKERUniverza na Dunaju, Oddelek za upravne študijeLorenz-Bayer-Platz 17/13, 1170 Dunaj, Avstrija

e-mail: [email protected]

POVZETEK Začenši s kratko razpravo o poskusih britanske obveščevalne službe MI6, da bi s

sabotažami in subverzijami odgovorila na nemško geopolitično nadvlado v Jugoslaviji v letih 1939/40, prispevek opredeljuje organizacijsko strukturo teh prizadevanj kot nadna-cionalno prevratniško mrežo, v katero je vključena cela vrsta različnih akterjev: državno vodene obveščevalne službe, nedržavna kulturna združenja, povezana z ilegalnimi političnimi skupinami, intelektualci in novinarji, politični aktivisti v izgnanstvu, begunci in dezerterji, pa tudi posamezniki, ki so prizadevanja podpirali preprosto iz prijateljskih ali sorodstvenih razlogov. Kljub temu da so prehajali državne meje in se povezovali z antifašisti iz različnih narodnostnih skupnosti na področju Alpe-Jadran, pa je za večino organiziranih aktivistov nacionalna država ostajala glavni referenčni okvir in objekt nji-hove lojalnosti.

V prispevku avtor izpostavi posebno vlogo, ki sta jo dva nemška socialdemokrata, Ja-kob Altmeier in Alfred Becker, lahko odigrala, zahvaljujoč svojim dolgoletnim političnim in poklicnim izkušnjam ter raznolikim stikom in jezikovnim veščinam, ki sta jih od leta 1933 pridobivala v izgnanstvu. Tovrstna iznajdljivost, tipična za intelektualce, novi-narje in dopisnike, je bila ključnega pomena za ustvarjanje nadnacionalnih odporniških mrež. Altmaier in Becker sta delovala kot predstavnika za stike za sekcijo D v srbskih, hrvaških in slovenskih protinemških in protifašističnih krogih in sta bila odgovorna za izdajo časopisov in letakov, ki so med drugim nagovarjali tudi nemške manjšine v Jugo-


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slaviji ter socialdemokrate in katolike v Avstriji. V izjemno težki fazi boja proti nacistični Nemčiji so nemški izgnanci, kot sta bila Altmaier in Becker, poosebljali nezlomljivo voljo do upora, nasprotovali predaji in s tem izražali odločno držo, ki je podpirala prozahodno privrženost, zlasti med begunci in lokalnimi antifašisti.

Druga skupina aktivistov, ki jih avtor obravnava v prispevku, je bila skupina lokalnih antifašistov in dezerterjev iz wehrmachta v avstrijskih deželah Koroške in Štajerske, ki je izvedla tri napade na nemške državne železnice (Reichsbahn). V sabotersko mrežo se je skupina povezala preko aktivistov slovenske narodno-liberalne ilegalne organi-zacije TIGR. Ti stiki so se večinoma razvili iz osebnih in družinskih vezi, saj čezmejnim tigrovcem ni uspelo vzpostaviti trdnih povezav s slovensko manjšino na Koroškem in tudi ne s komunistično ilegalo. Po predhodnih interpretacijah naj bi bile slovenske oze-meljske zahteve in močan avstrijski patriotizem razloga, zakaj koroška levičarska ilegala ni hotela sodelovati s tigrovci. Toda pozorno branje ene do študij Osrednjega urada za državno varnost (RSHA) ter dokumentov z nemških sodnih procesov in iz MI6 razkrivajo, da take interpretacije temeljijo bolj na specifični časovno-odvisni politični miselnosti, ki je prevladovala v Avstriji, kot pa na dokazih iz zgodovinskih dokumentov, saj ti kažejo, da so se v letih 1939/40 koroški Slovenci bolj prilagajali situaciji, kot pa si prizadevali za vojaški odpor, medtem ko so komunisti so v "imperialistični" vojni med Nemčijo in zahodnimi demokraciji zavzeli nevtralno stališče. Da je šlo za posebno vrsto političnega in ideološkega izkoriščanja, je razvidno že iz tega, kako so nacistični sodniki prikazovali sabotersko mrežo na wehrmachtovem vojaškem sodišču v Celovcu julija 1941, kmalu po nemškem napadu na Sovjetsko zvezo. Čeprav sodniki pri številnih obtoženih niso mogli dokazati levičarske usmeritve, so si izmislili skrivno zavezništvo med zahodnimi demokracijami in komunizmom, ki naj bi ga usmerjali Židi, da bi napadli Nemce. Šest obtožencev je bilo obsojenih na smrt, dva sta umrla v zaporu oziroma v koncentracijskem taborišču. Istočasno je esesovska varnostna služba (SS Sicherheitsdienst) "nacionalno slovensko duhovščino" in Slovensko kulturno zvezo okrivila teh napadov, da bi okrepila pritisk na slovensko manjšino.

V zadnjem poglavju avtor pojasnjuje, kako je po letu 1945 koroškim nacionalsocial-istom uspelo javno razglasiti usmrčene antifašiste za izdajalce. Več desetletij je bilo pre-povedano obeleževati spomin na te prve antifašistične aktiviste, preživele pa so utišali. Koncem devetdesetih let prejšnjega stoletja so lokalna kulturna združenja, kot je "Erin-nern Villach" ("Beljak se spominja"), premagala postnacistični ostrakizem. Na uradni politični ravni se je to zgodilo šele oktobra 2009, ko je avstrijski parlament enoznačno re-habilitiral vse avstrijske vojake in civiliste, obsojene na wehrmachtovih vojaških sodiščih.

Ključne besede: MI6, SOE, TIGR, nemško izgnanstvo, Avstrija, koroški Slovenci, odporništvo, predvojna Jugoslavija, politike iz preteklosti



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